A recent episode of PBS’s History Detectives featured a woman who wanted to know about the man who drew a picture of her father Bill when he was in a Nazi POW camp during WWII. She wondered who he was, if he survived, and if he went on to become an artist. What emerged was an interesting glimpse into wartime suffering, community, and humanity. Many of the American soldiers held in this camp, located in Austria, had been shot down over France and Germany and were cut off from everyone they knew and all ties back home. As one can imagine, life was tough there, and it was only through the Geneva Conventions and assistance of the Red Cross, that these soldiers received the little they did. There were over two hundred men to a barrack, and these were reminiscent of the barracks used in concentrations camps: close quarters, no…